Two or three stories into Tamas Dobozy's well-crafted collection, one begins to imagine the author hunched not over a keyboard but a well-worn workbench, hammer and chisel in his grip, nouns and verbs spread like raw material before him. Born of hearty Hungarian stock, it's clear Dobozy worked like an ox to fashion each of his 10 elegant and articulate stories, buffing each sentence with spit and polish, holding them up to the light to see if they gleam.

At once deeply sad and deeply funny, Dobozy's stories reference mental illness, family power struggles and the dubiousness of history, which, according to this author, cannot be trusted. History requires us to take a stand, after all, to admit to our mistakes, to destroy the facades we create to keep the truth hidden. In “Philip's Killer Hats” a man goes to great lengths to humor his crazed brother, who believes that Thelonious Monk's propensity for wearing tight hats was the cause of his insanity. In “Into the Ring” a married couple takes their failing marriage behind the ropes, where they literally pummel each other to see if there is still some vestige of love left under all the protective layers. And in the poignant and surprising “Tales of Hungarian Resistance” a grandson doubts his grandfather's version of the family history, becoming so desperate to learn the truth that he takes pity on the Nazi interrogator who once questioned the secretive old man about his participation in the Hungarian resistance.

“And after all that grandfather and I went through, after all the explanations and accusations, the only legacy that remains is this sympathy for a Nazi who, like me, starved for lack of evidence, losing himself in the act of seeking an impossible verification. I am haunted by Mennyazky because his obsession is my obsession, because I am, like him, not able to trust my information, and because I have become my grandfather's interrogator.”

As “The Half Life of Stars” unfolds, an Englishman named Daniel has gone missing, leaving his wife, baby and a lucrative law career to hitch a ride on a tramp ship bound for Florida, where his father died of a heart attack years before. And it wasn't just any garden variety heart attack, either – this one was brought on by the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle, which both father and son witnessed.

Meanwhile, Claire, Daniel's sister, learns from a waitress in a dingy basement sushi restaurant that her runaway brother, an occasional customer, might have been inspired to stow away by a Japanese drama he saw on the restaurant's aging television set. And it just so happens that Daniel knows a Russian gangster, who just so happens to know how to get him on such a ship. Oh, and then there's the scene where film producer Harvey Weinstein gets kidnapped. But that's just a side plot, really.

“The Half Life of Stars,” as you might have gathered, is more than a little cockamamie. At times, it seems as if author Louise Wener can't help herself from over-spicing her novel with eccentric characters and absurd coincidences, even when the story was moving along just fine without them. More notable for their quirks than any real personality traits, Wener's characters seem too purposely invented, as if they are dropped into the story merely to add a certain color or comic relief to the stilted plot. To her credit, Wener (“Goodnight Steve McQueen” and “The Perfect Play”) usually senses when her plot is getting over-salted. She adds a bit of sweetness to compensate – mostly in the form of sentimentality and redemption, family dramas and love affairs that do help to round out the character of Claire, but do little to make us care about her brother, the missing Daniel. In the end, the only reason we want Claire to succeed is so that it might keep Wener from throwing one more curveball into a story already pelted by them.

The Best American Short Stories
Edited by Ann Patchett
Houghton Mifflin, 388 pages, $14

If you buy one book this year, ensure a little bang for your buck with this journey through the vibrant worlds of 20 authors, including masters of the genre like Ann Beattie, Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff and Donna Tartt, as well as past Strictly Fictional favorites David Bezmozgis and Aleksandar Hemon. And so what that they're short stories and not tomes, not the culmination of years and years of toil and countless printer cartridges: “The first thing the short story needs,” writes editor Ann Patchett in her introduction to the collection, “is to think about casting off the role of The Novel's Little Sidekick, the practice run, the warm-up act. I was extolling the virtues of a particularly dazzling short story to an editor friend recently when she cut me off in mid-sentence, said she didn't want to hear it. 'I'll only fall in love,' she said bitterly, 'and then I won't be able to buy the book, and if I do buy the book I won't be able to sell it.' ”